All TV: Let's not do the time warp again

"Journeyman" is the story of Dr. Sam Beckett, a prize-winning scientist who uses his own time travel invention and winds up trapped in the past, leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

No, wait. "Journeyman" is the story of Marty McFly, a high school kid who drives a DeLorean 30 years into the past, where he bumps into his parents as teenagers and has to make sure they fall in love so he can be born.

No, wait. "Journeyman" is the story of Henry DeTamble, a Chicago librarian who suffers from a genetic disorder called Chrono-Displacement and spends his life shifting back and forth through time, always finding a way to return to his beloved wife, Clare.

No, I'm sorry. None of that's right.

One of the problems with "Journeyman" (10 p.m., Ch. 4) -- which is, in fact, about a San Francisco reporter named Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd) who begins traveling back in time to fix the lives of strangers, often bumping into his presumed-dead fiancee Livia (Moon Bloodgood) -- is that so many other TV shows ("Quantum Leap"), movies ("Back to the Future") and books ("The Time-Traveler's Wife") have gotten to this material first.

Being derivative isn't a sin in and of itself -- imitation is the sincerest form of television, after all -- but "Journeyman" doesn't do anything especially interesting with its time-twisting premise. It's competently produced, but unless you have a tremendous amount of affection for McKidd left over from his work as the insane Lucius Vorenus on HBO's "Rome," it's skippable.

I was never a big "Rome" fan, and the Scottish-born McKidd is too busy looking puzzled by Dan's unexplained jaunts to the past -- not to mention perfecting his American non-regional diction-- to do much acting. The pilot episode has one moment at the end with real emotional heft, as Dan finds a way to convince wife Katie (Gretchen Egolf) that he's really traveling through time, but it's undercut with the opening of episode two, where she once again doesn't believe him.

The second episode also suggests that the writers -- led by "West Wing" alum Kevin Falls -- don't have much time for subtlety when it comes to signifying Dan's time shifts (which thus far all seem to be within his own life span, a la "Quantum Leap"). When he winds up on an airplane in 1975, everyone's smoking, the stewardesses are wearing bright orange uniforms and, just in case we didn't get it, the soundtrack is blaring KC and the Sunshine Band's disco chestnut "Get Down Tonight."

A later scene finds him visiting a hotel hosting a bankers convention in the mid-'90s, and our signal that he's returned to the present is that, upon exiting, the hotel entrance now has a banner for an "Internet Erotica Convention." (Because that's exactly what it would be called, right?)

Two other points of interest: This is the second show in as many seasons to feature Moon Bloodgood as a woman so amazing that her lover travels back in time to save her life (last year it was Taye Diggs on "Day Break"), and, as Dan's cop brother Jack, Reed Diamond ("Homicide") looks so much like McKidd that it's kind of shocking he doesn't have a Scottish accent in real life.

And the fact that I spent so much time in the first two episodes pondering minutiae like that suggests that the "Journeyman" characters and plots aren't that interesting at the moment.

Nerd persecution ends

Geeks rule this season on TV -- even when their shows don't. Sure, the nerds-with-superpowers shows "Chuck" and "Reaper" are among the fall's best new shows, and so is the CW's upcoming comedy "Aliens In America" (about nerds from two different hemispheres).

But not all Nerd Power shows are created equal. Case in point: "The Big Bang Theory" (8:30 p.m., Ch. 2), a lame new sitcom from "Two And a Half Men" co-creator Chuck Lorre, about two CalTech dweebs who befriend the blonde airhead who moves in next door.

The dweebs are named Leonard (Johnny Galecki from "Roseanne") and Sheldon (Jim Parsons), in an homage to the legendary producer of "I Spy" and "The Andy Griffith Show." The airhead is named Penny, and played by Kaley Cuoco from "8 Simple Rules," apparently cast in an homage to Suzanne Somers from "Three's Company."

More homage, intentional or not: In the middle of the pilot episode, Penny complains to Sheldon and Leonard that her shower is broken, and before you know it she's wandering around their apartment in a towel to use their facilities. This is an actual plot in a TV show in the year 2007? Somebody didn't accidentally staple in a few pages from an unused "Charles in Charge" script?

Lorre's a professional -- juvenile and sniggering as it is, "Two and a Half Men" knows how to set up and deliver jokes -- and there are occasional laughs in "Big Bang Theory." Parsons, a relative newcomer, has an off-kilter delivery that makes even the predictable punchlines seem unexpected, and occasionally he gets a line that's as surprising on the page as from his mouth, like when he shows off a white board of physics equations to Penny and knowingly boasts, "That down there, it's just a joke. It's a spoof of the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation."

Too often, though, the gags go for the broadest, cheapest note possible. Penny is hot but dumb; she's writing a screenplay about her experiences as a Cheesecake Factory waitress. The geeks are brilliant but socially awkward; their idea of a good time is listening to the "Battlestar Galactica" DVD commentaries (as if guys this nerdy wouldn't have downloaded the podcasts and listened to them the same night the episodes aired). Etc.

Still, it's better than that show based on the Geico caveman ads.

Blogging the new season

So I've started previewing all of this year's new -- and, when I have time, returning -- shows. Now it's time to start talking about them after you've seen them. Beginning today, the All TV blog is going live again, full-time, and will feature regular posts about everything I watched on TV the night before. It'll be a chance to get to the heart of episodes without worrying about advance spoilers, and to engage in some immediate back and forth with you fine readers.

If you go there now, there will be an introduction (including a list of some of the shows I'll be regularly blogging about), plus some thoughts on Sunday night programming including the Fox animated comedies, PBS' "The War" and HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." And if you read the column online, it'll be a place where you can reliably find every one, every time I write.

There's about to be a lot of new TV to talk about, and between this column and the blog, we're going to talk a lot about it.